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Thursday, July 24th, 2014

You can quickly insert text from a file into your document using Word’s Text from File command. This used to be as simple as choosing Insert > File but the command got hidden behind an additional layer of the UI in Word 2007, making it almost entirely invisible to most users.

To insert text from a file in all recent versions of Word, open the Insert tab in the ribbon and, in the Text settings find the Object button. Click the small arrow to the right of the Object button, and choose Text from File…. Choose the file you want and click Insert. The file type selection here defaults to Word documents only, so if you wish to insert a .txt file or other non-Word document, you’ll have to change the file type to your desired type or All Files.

If you insert a Word document it will include all elements of the document such as images and special formatting. If you wish to include the file’s header or footer (if it has one), you should insert the file into a new section of your document. Be careful when inserting multiple files with different formats, since text from one file may take on another file’s format if the inserts aren’t separated properly.

Tuesday, June 11th, 2013

Learn to use ‘Save as type’ to format your document so users of older versions of Word can access them

You can easily exchange files with users of older versions of Word. This is because Word 2007, 2010, and 2013 essentially share the same file format. So it is pretty easy to open any Word document created using version 2007, 2010 or 2013 in any other of these three versions of Word. In addition, Word 2007, 2010, and 2013 will open files from any previous version of Word.

However, when you need to share a Word 2007, 2010, or 2013 file with someone using a much earlier version such as Word 2003 or a Mac version of Word, you must save the file using their particular Word file format. This is because the file formats are not the same and the older versions of Word cannot read the newer file formats.

To save using the appropriate format, select the File tab on the Ribbon, and click Save As. In the Save As dialog, click the Save as type: dropdown list and select the word processing format that matches the software that your other user is using such as Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc). Then click Save to save it in that format.

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

Learn how to crop and resize in bulk in Lightroom. If you have a lot of images you need to, for example, crop to 5 x 7 and then save at a particular pixel size and resolution, you can learn how to do this quickly and effectively in Lightroom. This makes use of the tools in the Quick Develop panel in the Library module.

Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can bulk crop and resize images and export them from Lightroom.

A reader recently posed a question to me and that was what do I do if I need to crop all my images to 5 by 7 in size and get them out as 500 by 700 pixel images. In Lightroom that’s not that difficult to do. What I suggest you do is you do it from the Library in Quick Develop mode. So I’m going to select the images here and then I’m going to select Crop Ratio and I’m going to choose 5 by 7. And that will crop all of these images to 5 by 7 images. But look what it’s done with the verticals. It’s cropped them to 5 by 7 but it’s kept that same vertical alignment.

So now let’s go to the Develop module and just see what we’re seeing here. This is the crop marquee. And you can see that this image, each one of these images in fact has been cropped to 5 by 7. And let’s go and find a vertical crop and see how it’s been cropped. Again, it’s been cropped to 5 by 7 but in a vertical direction. So this means that all of these images have automatically been cropped.

All we would do is have a quick look and make sure that important parts of the image have not been cropped off. If these were people we’d have a quick check to make sure that somebody’s head hasn’t been chopped off for example. And having done that now knowing that everything is cropped to 5 by 7, to export these images at 500 by 700 pixels in size or 700 by 500 we would select all of them by clicking on the first and Shift click on the last. I’m going to right click and choose Export and then Export again and we would just set up the Export option. So here I’m going to put this in a folder called 5 by 7.

I don’t want to rename these files. All we want to do is to resize them. But what I do want to do is I want to select Resize to Fit. And the longest edge since I know that these are all 5 by 7s is going to be 700 pixels and the resolution I can set to 100 pixels per inch. So these are then going to be 5 by 7 images at 100 pixels per inch resolution. And all I need to do is to click Export and Lightroom is going ahead and it is cropping and resizing all of those images so that they are all going to be the exact right size that we chose. And here they are including the ones that were verticals. You can see that these are 500 by 700 pixels in size. This one is 700 by 500 because it’s a landscape image.

So in Lightroom you could batch resize and export these images in just a matter of a few seconds by just choosing the right option. And that is here in the Quick Develop module setting a crop ratio for those images. This is not something you can do easily in the Develop module, but it’s something that you can do very, very simply here in the Quick Develop area of the Library in Lightroom.

My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this Lightroom video tutorial. If you liked the tutorial please comment, press the Like button, consider subscribing to my YouTube channel. You’ll also find more of my tutorials, tips and tricks on my website at projectwoman.com.

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

Download a history of your Twitter Tweets today!

I could really do with a file of my tweets. It will help me to schedule future tweets by being able to recycle some of the best of our old ones. Luckily, recently, Twitter began offering this as an option. If you want to, you can download an entire file of your tweets from the first of them that you made.

To do this, log in to Twitter and go to your Settings, click Edit Profile and then click Account. Scroll to the bottom. There you will find a button Request Your Archive that you can press to get your tweets.

Wait and in a few hours and you’ll be emailed a link to download your entire archive.

This comes as a zip file which you must first unzip. There is an index.html file in the zip that you can run to view all your tweets in a browser interface. There are also other files containing them – such as a series of .csv files one for each month that you can open in Excel.

It’s a great way to get a permanent record of your tweets it you need it.